Blackberry's incentive of $100 per approved app appears to have motivated developers. 1,000 people around the globe recently participated in online events and submitted over 15,000 apps for BlackBerry 10.

In a tweet sent at the end of two events held January 11-13, one for porting existing Android apps, the other covering other platforms, Alex Saunders RIM's VP for Developer Relations was jubilant:

The porth-a-thons were designed to have apps ready for the Blackberry 10 launch taking place on 30 January when the long-awaited operating system plus two new smartphones become available. RIM is planning to launch about 70,000 new applications at the event, in a bid to meet its target to support 90% of the top 600 most popular apps in the global app market.

Two factor appear to have contributed to the success of the events. One was the financial incentive - devs were lured with the prospect of $100 per approved app (up to a limit of 20 apps per vendor) plus chances to win a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha Device by submitting 5 or more apps. The other was the ease of porting existing apps with some devs claiming to have ported apps in under a minute.

RIM seems to be making devs feel loved and wanted and as a result Blackberry 10 may indeed succeed - and could certainly do better than Windows Phone 8.

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